Air Power And The Ground War In Vietnam, Ideas And Actions

Dr Donald J. Mrozek

• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781786250131
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Ultimately, this study is about a smaller Vietnam War than that which is commonly recalled. It focuses on expectations concerning the impact of air power on the ground war and on some of its actual effects, but it avoids major treatment of some of the most dramatic air actions of the war, such as the bombing of Hanoi. To many who fought the war and believe it ought to have been conducted on a still larger scale or with fewer restraints, this study may seem almost perverse, emphasizing as it does the utility of air power in conducting the conflict as a ground war and without total exploitation of our most awe-inspiring technology.
Although the chapters in this study are intended to form a coherent and unified argument, each also offers discrete messages. The chapters are not meant to be definitive. They do not exhaust available documentary material, and they often rely heavily on published accounts. Nor do they provide a complete chronological picture of the uses of air power, even with respect to the ground war. Nor is coverage of areas in which air power was employed—South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam—evenly distributed nor necessarily proportionate to the effort expended in each place during the war. Lastly, some may find one or another form of air power either slightly or insufficiently treated. Such criticisms are beside the point, for the objectives of this study are to explore a comparatively neglected theme—the impact of air power on the ground—and to encourage further utilization of lessons drawn from the Vietnam experience.

PART ONE — EVERYBODY’S WAR, NOBODY’S WAR

Many readily accept as a truism that US commitment to the war in Vietnam lacked unity, clarity, and coherence. But few ever state, much less accept, the corollary—that the commitment of the various parties to the war was similarly mooted. Fixed points of reference were lacking; and, without criteria for performance that might be imposed across the board on civilian and military agencies to determine mission accomplishment, the war “fell between the cracks.” With everybody drawn into the act, it was a war belonging to no one in particular—perhaps not even President Lyndon Johnson, whose name was most often affixed to the conflict. Fragmentation of authority was paralleled by fragmentation of responsibility and, equally important, by fragmentation of the sense of responsibility. The attitude alleged to have governed much of US behavior in the later stages of the war—that the conflict not be lost “on our watch” but, by implication, on someone else’s—was the final, bitter, and sterile incarnation of this erosion of responsibility, which in turn was born of the inability to impose a coherent vision of the war as a whole.

The US effort in Vietnam was not an intellectually, culturally, or technically neutral response to external problems created by an external enemy. Nor was it unaffected by its own internal dynamics—the American way of war which included a specific set of preferences for different groups about how best to use air power. Thus, what Americans thought about air power as they approached the problems of Southeast Asia became a distinct player in the conflict, affecting the war. Perhaps it would be better to say players in the plural, since there were disagreements.

Consciousness of these ideas and the self-limiting and self-restraining qualities they impose is the key for the future. Otherwise, we bind ourselves to unthinking misuse of our resources, and we risk misinterpreting the situation while we unconsciously protect our less-examined predilections.

The military services often seemed far more interested in jockeying with one another than the situation may have demanded, and this rivalry had several serious effects: (1) efforts to resolve conflicts over command and control and strategy went on far too long, perhaps too long to come to grips with the real problem; (2) a decision once agreed upon could not easily be overturned, since it represented either a delicate political compromise or too much invested effort and sunk cost; and (3) whatever the reality behind the service’s motivations, the military seemed so self-serving as to undermine the authority they could have mustered with the executive branch, in the moments when it was open to advice, or with the Congress.

Interservice and intraservice rivalries, especially at lower levels, cannot be expected to vanish magically in wartime. Their resolution must receive high priority in peacetime if US forces are to be capable of handling the multifaceted aspects of a low-intensity conflict; and as such conflicts escalate to mid-level or above, the damage resulting from interservice rivalry becomes even more serious.

Successive administrations in the United States failed to make clear or unqualified commitments to what they wished to achieve in Southeast Asia. (The Nixon administration, once it set getting out of Vietnam as its maximum military and general policy priority, was a possible exception.) Even the Kennedy administration qualified—perhaps even contradicted—its own verbal commitment to counterinsurgency. It did so, for example, by leaping to emergency insertion of US combat-capable troops to buy time when the accepted view was that counterinsurgency must be handled slowly and gradually. That view of effective counterinsurgency also, in effect, contained the risk of loss and even general failure; but the Kennedy administration could not swallow it. The Johnson administration, despite the magnitude of its escalations, perceived that it was engaged in a continuing political process even more than in waging a war; but there is reason to suspect that the interpretation given to Johnson’s “language of military actions” in Washington was different from that given in Hanoi.

Despite the desire to keep options open, an administration must take into account that the use of military force at various levels and in various combinations begins to impose certain limiting qualities on its freedom of action. Once a military option is to be considered, it must be assessed in terms of both its military and political effects. Further, for all the talk of responsiveness of military forces, civilians and military alike must remember that there are limits to both the responsiveness and the flexibility of any piece of bureaucratic machinery: a tactic can be changed faster in the mind than in the field, and a strategy can be jotted down faster on paper than it can be translated into force structure and deployment. Vietnam illustrated, among other things, that ideas and execution can be persistently out of phase. One would hesitate to say that virtually any one policy should have been maintained rather than risk a mess caused by changes in policy. Yet this view is useful enough to invite consideration.

The Vietnam War does not tell us whether we can effectively fight a counterinsurgency, since we were never fully dedicated to it. Counterinsurgency is therefore not a discredited or disproven concept. A similar logic applies to many technical and operational aspects of the war. In short, the subsets of the war—its practical matters—can be decoupled from some of its theoretical ones. Efficiency does not prove effectiveness. Efficiency means merely the skillful execution of a predetermined routine; effectiveness suggests that the routine had a useful purpose and that executing it achieved the predetermined goal. But ineffectiveness in Vietnam does not necessarily indicate probable ineffectiveness elsewhere.

CHAPTER 1 — Air Power Theories, Air Force Thinking, and the Conflict in Vietnam — The Past Was Prologue

“Ever since the First World War, Air Power has held political allure, seeming to offer the promise of almost painless victory. The promise has not always been fulfilled, but it is part of the nature of air power that its real effects are often difficult to separate from those claimed.” — William Shawcross

How the Air Force and the other services interpreted the Vietnam War depended largely on what they thought about military power and its employment in general. Although events in Southeast Asia had discrete features, they looked different to observers according to their various perspectives. Different points of view generated different visions of war, sometimes calling for contrary solutions. And the war on the ground and in the air over Vietnam played against the war within the minds of military and civilian observers as to whose vision was right. Thus Air Force thinking and mentality became one among many autonomous variables in shaping and interpreting events in Vietnam.

As the United States became more involved in the war in Vietnam, it lacked a coherent understanding of air power—what it could do, what equipment it required, what organization it needed, and what conflicts it was best suited for. Nor was there even a common sense of what air power was. Did the term apply simply to anything that flew, or must it be reserved for special air vehicles organized in special ways? At the same time, despite the uncertainties concerning air power and how to use it, there were deep-seated hopes about its potential. The promise of air power persisted, no matter what difficulties had appeared in air operations in the decades before the Vietnam War. But the effort to fulfill the promise was fragmented, broken among the several military services and even among factions within them. The fragmentation so much a part of the history of air power came to bear on the war in Southeast Asia. Past debates over air power formed a complex prologue to Vietnam.

Ideas prominent in the Air Force in the early 1960s were rooted in decades of thinking by air power theorists about concepts and doctrines that were articulated with special force after 1947. These ideas carried forward in a direct line from the interwar years into the Vietnam era. Despite the diversity of views within the Air Force, there were broad areas of consensus: the importance of the strategic deterrent, the effectiveness of manned bombing, and the need for air superiority. And, notwithstanding differences among the several services, there was interservice acceptance that the vertical dimension in modern warfare could not be evaded. Yet the closer one adhered to original ideas about air power or to their lineal descendants, the closer one came to developing an absolute model for the use of air power in warfare—one that might not only run afoul of competing interpretations, developed in the other services or even among civilians, but also force the realities of the war at hand to conform to the expectations of one’s theory. The closer one’s views about war in the 1960s conformed to air power theories shaped in the interwar years, the less might they respond to novel pressures and demands imposed by events or civilian authorities. The more one insisted upon the decisiveness of one form of air power, the greater the danger that other forms would languish. In this way, theories about air power and specific Air Force thinking about it became players in the conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s.

The distinctiveness of the way of war advocated by US exponents of air power is itself part of a broader scheme. The attractiveness of air power to Americans—even in its extreme or ideal forms—stems largely from its compatibility with deep-seated national tendencies and preferences as to the conduct of war. In The American Way of War, for example, historian Russell F. Weigley delineated the characteristic ways the United States has fought its wars. Americans have persistently seen themselves as outnumbered, whether against more numerous Indians in the seventeenth century, the so-called Yellow Peril of the nineteenth century, or the stereotypical Chinese hordes and Russian bear in the twentieth.

Occasionally, this feeling of insufficiency is fortified by isolated events such as the Custer massacre or perhaps the siege at Khe Sanh. In their desire to offset this perceived sense of numerical inferiority, US leaders have developed an intense reliance on firepower and technology. From firing cannon to overawe the Indians in colonial Virginia through the comparatively heavy use of firepower by Benjamin Church in King Philip’s War to the increasing carnage of the US Civil War, these tendencies strengthened. As the sickening anxiety over attrition in World War I was added to the stored memories of earlier wars, bombardment aircraft seemed to offer a clean, scientific, and lifesaving means to attain security objectives in a manner that best suited the nation’s peculiar strengths while minimizing its shortcomings.{1}

In part, the rise of air power to its integral place in US strategy and doctrine depended on an altered distinction between combatant and non-combatant. This process began in the Civil War with William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant. Both of these Union generals accepted the idea of a people’s war in which those civilian institutions that supported an enemy’s military capability became legitimate military targets as a prototypical home front. This idea later became part of a larger re-evaluation of Jominian and Clausewitzian strategic thinking that led to a broadened sense of permissible conduct in war. And on this, the structure of a strategic air offensive was ultimately built.

Gen Frederick C. Weyand, former chief of staff of the Army and the last head of the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, styled the US way of war as “particularly violent, deadly and dreadful. We believe in using ‘things’—artillery, bombs, massive firepower—in order to conserve our soldiers’ lives.” General Weyand also noted that the enemies faced by the United States in Vietnam did nearly the opposite, compensating for a “lack of ‘things’ by expending men instead of machines.”{2} The enemy were not only people and the materiel they could gather, but the very way in which war and its prosecution were conceived. Not only was the United States at war in Vietnam, but its whole way of thinking about conflict was at war, too. Serious reflection on the Korean War might have prepared the United States better for the kind of Vietcong and North Vietnamese commitment that was encountered in Vietnam; and failure to capitalize on that earlier experience suggested the persistence of this special US mentality about war. Actual conditions in the theater of conflict comprise only one part of a much broader phenomenon. The distinctive way US strategists view war is especially evident in the manner in which they have looked at air power and its role in combat.

The Thrust of US Air Power Theories

Several persistent themes have appeared amid the accumulation of ideas about air power in America, and these eventually influenced the use of air forces in Vietnam.{3} These themes derive their coherence less from how they interacted technically in the events of the 1960s and 1970s than from their common origin in the thinking done between World Wars I and II. First, air power’s proponents, especially the most ardent, have typically stressed the essential novelty of the air age and the consequent irrelevance of historical experience. The new principles and practices of air power supposedly superseded old military lessons and dogmas, which had arisen in reflection on the character of surface warfare. New doctrines for air power risked ignoring the test of experience, which obviously could be formed only in the past. However much the advocates of air power would later seek evidence in its short history, validation for their contentions lay in theory itself. The emphasis on novelty was also made possible by a corollary feature so often discussed that it appears to be a separate theme. The advocates of air power developed an especially strong dependence upon technological innovation and a peculiar attachment to weapons and systems projected for the future rather than those of the more conventional present. Although land power and sea power theorists were also attracted to technology, air enthusiasts showed a special commitment because the movement and service they fostered owed their very identities to a comparatively recent technological breakthrough. While they accepted the importance of air forces as a constant and an absolute, they insisted on a diligent and permanent search for improved aircraft and weapons types to fulfill airpower’s promise. The words of Gen Henry H. Arnold shortly after World War II exemplify this thrust:

“The first essential of air power necessary for peace and security is the preeminence in research. . . . We must count on scientific advances requiring us to replace about one-fifth of existing Air Forces equipment each year and we must be sure that these additions are the most advanced in the whole world.{4}”

Although he wanted numbers, General Arnold regarded improved technology as essential. The result was a diminished opinion of the worth of those aircraft and weapons that were not of the most recent and most advanced design.

A third theme advanced by proponents of air power in this country has been the essentiality—perhaps the dominance—of the strategic air offensive. The best defense in a generic sense depended upon a force that could project an offense in the concrete sense. For example, defending the United States seemed to require an air force that could strike the enemy’s heartland. In time, this attitude proved compatible with the formal strategy of deterrence. But because it had roots in a strategic vision that considered doing away with surface engagements, the Air Force and its forbearers gave considerably lower priority to some matters, such as the support of ground and sea forces, which were vital to the Army and Navy. At the very least, the Air Force showed this priority in ways which the other se...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE - EVERYBODY’S WAR, NOBODY’S WAR
• PART TWO - “TWO, THREE... MANY VIETNAMS”
• PART THREE - REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS